Is organic farming better?

Dan Conable writes, in a letter published in the New Yorker, about his organic grain farming operation:

[T]hough my practices may have a relatively benign impact on my surroundings as compared with conventional farming, their larger environmental impact is not so clear. Controlling weeds without herbicides generally requires more tillage. Turning the soil more frequently means using more diesel fuel per ton of grain, as well as freeing more of the carbon stored in the soil. More important from a climate-change perspective, organic farmers’ reliance on manure as the critical nitrogen source for crops in the grass family (corn, wheat, oats, barley) makes us utterly dependent on animal agriculture. If the world were to feed itself wholly by organic methods, an increase in cattle, pig, and poultry production would be needed to provide the necessary fertilizer—at least until scientists can genetically modify grasses to capture their own nitrogen. But, then, G.M.O.s aren’t organic. Letter from Dan Conable, 'New Yorker', dated 20 December

The sort of life-cycle analyses (LCAs) required to establish the environmental benefits or otherwise of shifts in our behaviour are bedevilled by boundary issues, measurement difficulties and the difficulty of weighting one type of environmental impact against another. They might be better than going on the gut feeling that organic agriculture is 'better' than the conventional kind, or that vegan clothes are better than animal fabrics, rail is better than air travel, solar power is better than coal-fired power stations, etc, but for the making of robust policy LCAs would need to be continually reassessed in the light of our ever-expanding knowledge of the environment, our ever-changing environmental priorities, and our every-changing technological endowment. 

Government policy cannot ever be so responsive nor, probably, can any single organisation - at least not as currently structured. If government were to use life-cycle analysis with the aim of altering our behaviour, it would necessarily do so on the basis of a one-time, limited, and possibly subjective assessment of environmental costs and benefits. It’s not good enough, but even worse would be what we largely have now: environmental policy based on corporate interests, 'what feels right', media stories and the launching of visually appealing initiatives that attract air time but are otherwise useless. These often focus on trendiest problems, of which the current one is climate change, which tends to crowd out other, possibly more urgent crises.

The Social Policy Bond concept as applied to the environment would take a different approach. It would first clarify what environmental goals, national or global, we wish to achieve. Say, for instance, that we wish to preserve the Earth's marine environment. A Social Policy Bond issue that rewarded the sustained achievement of such a goal would generate incentives for bondholders to bring it about at least cost. They might well carry out life-cycle analyses in their attempt to do so. But there is an important difference between the way do they would conduct their research and the way government, or any supra-government body would do so: bondholders have continuous long-term incentives to achieve our goals efficiently. This is likely to mean responding to and stimulating increased knowledge of scientific relationships, and technical advances. Investors might conduct LCAs, but they would do so in ways that optimise the benefit to the marine environment per dollar spent.

Effective environmental policy must take a long-term view and for national or global goals, will need to encourage diverse, adaptive approaches. The environment and our knowledge about it are just too complex for the simplistic 'it feels good', command-and-control approach that, for instance, brands 'organic farming' as good, or plastic shopping bags as bad. Diverse, adaptive approaches to addressing complex problems are precisely the sort of responses that government does very badly. However, government does have crucial roles in articulating society’s environmental goals and in raising the revenue to pay for their achievement: in the democratic countries government performs these functions quite well. But actually achieving society's social and environmental goals is a different matter. Such achievement requires continuous, well-informed and impartial decisions to be made about the allocation of scarce resources. For that purpose, Social Policy Bonds, with their incentives to achieve targeted outcomes efficiently would, I believe, be far better than the current ways in which environmental policy is formulated.
 

For more about applying the Social Policy Bond principle to the environment see here. (For a personal policy paper on organic agriculture, see here.)